讲座：Lexical tone activation in bilingual spoken word recognition
郭桃梅老师课题组邀请了英国格林威治大学Dr. Wang Xin来实验室做学术报告，欢迎感兴趣的老师和同学参加。讲座信息如下：
讲座题目：Lexical tone activation in bilingual spoken word recognition
主讲人：Dr. Wang Xin
时 间：6月7日 上午10点
地 点：英东楼 422会议室
摘 要：
Bilingual lexical access in the auditory modality is relatively under-researched than the visual modality, esp. with bilinguals whose language pairs are typologically different (e.g., Chinese vs. English). I will discuss a set of RT and eye-tracking data to tap into the mechanism of lexical access in bilingual spoken word recognition. First, two auditory lexical decision tasks were designed to investigate whether both languages are activated when bilinguals are exclusively processing one of their languages. We compared the processing of interlingual homophones and non-interlingual homophones while other features of words are matched: number of syllables and phonemes, phonological neighborhood, and frequency. The results show no difference between monolinguals vs. bilinguals. In the second task, we superimposed Mandarin tones onto the same English words in the same task. Interestingly, the results show a different pattern between bilinguals and monolinguals. That is, bilinguals showed significant delay in responding to inter-lingual homophones. These results demonstrate strong cross-language effects at the supra-segmental level and partially support the language non-selective lexical access mechanism.
Second, using the visual world paradigm, we performed two eyetracking experiments to investigate whether supra-segmental information in a tonal L1 (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) is also activated when bilinguals are exclusively processing a non-tonal L2 (e.g., English). In experiment 1, we presented Mandarin-English bilinguals with target stimuli that were inter-lingual homophones between Mandarin and English (e.g., English bay sounds similar to Mandarin bei4). Critically, competitors directly overlapped with English targets segmentally and supra-segmentally (e.g., bei4) or just segmentally (bei1). In experiment 2, competition was instead mediated via covert translation. For example, for the English target tree, competitors either matched the Mandarin translation equivalent segmentally and supra-segmentally (e.g., shu4) or just segmentally (e.g., shu1). In both experiments, combined segmental and supra-segmental overlap gave rise to differential competitive effects compared to segmental overlap alone. These results suggest lexical tones are activated in bilingual lexical access even when processing a non-tonal language.
